4 February 2016

A few years ago a friend served me plum sorbet she'd made in her icecream maker. The plums were from her backyard tree, and I was so impressed by the winter flavour burst of summer plums that I promptly bought my own icecream maker. Sadly it has mainly sat in the cupboard, and you might see it on Trade Me soon.

My version

Now I have come up with my own way of having my hit of plums all year round. Our Hawera plum tree is dropping more fruit every day than we can eat, and many of them are over-ripe. Roughly chopped and frozen, though, and added to a smoothie, they are incredible. Better than frozen berries, I reckon, and I know that's saying a lot.

My smoothie has a banana, frozen plums, kefir (or unsweetened yoghurt) and a teaspoon of coconut oil. I whiz it up with a stick blender. It's delicious, cheap, healthy and filling.

Harvest tomato sauce

We manage to eat enough tomatoes around here that we don't have a lot left to cook with - or maybe the problem is that we don't grow enough. Anyway, I buy big, cheap bags of cooking tomatoes from the Farmer's Market. Then I make Annabel Langbein's Harvest Tomato Sauce (see the recipe here). It is the BEST, and incredibly easy - in spite of what the recipe says, you don't even need to chop the tomatoes - just throw them whole into the roasting dish with the other ingredients, stir and put in the oven. It gets pureed after cooking and cooling.

I also modify the recipe by leaving out the capsicum (purely because we scoff all those raw), chilli and sugar.

Then I freeze a lot of it in old honey containers. We use it on pizza bases, on fried eggplant for eggplant parmesan, and with pasta and meatballs. My children love to eat it by itself with spaghetti noodles, too.